The reactive ion etching of quartz and Pyrex substrates was carried out using CF4 /Ar and CF4 /O2 gas mixtures in a combined radio frequency ~rf!/microwave ~mw! plasma. It was observed that the etch rate and the surface morphology of the etched regions depended on the gas mixture ~CF4 /Ar or CF4 /O2), the relative concentration of CF4 in the gas mixture, the rf power ~and the associated self-in...

Research and development in semiconducting silicon carbide (SiC) technology has produced significant progress in the past five years in many areas: material (bulk and thin film) growth, device fabrication, and applications. A major factor in this rapid growth has been the development of SiC bulk crystals and the availability of crystalline substrates. Current leading applications for SiC device...

Large area Multilayer Dielectric (MLD) diffraction gratings are essential components for temporal pulse compression in high energy laser systems. MLD grating designs typically consist of a silica grating layer on top of a dielectric multilayer reflector. A reactive ion beam etching (RIBE) process using a gridded radio frequency (RF) ion source was developed to uniformly etch the silica grating ...

We present growth studies on gallium nitride (GaN) stripes with {101̄1} side facets grown on c-oriented GaN templates on sapphire. Via plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD), a 20 nm thick SiO2 mask is deposited on top of the templates. Afterwards, a polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) based resist is patterned with stripes oriented along the GaN a-direction by electron beam (e-beam) lithog...

The etching of silicon by a chlorine inductively coupled plasma ~ICP! was studied using laser desorption laser-induced fluorescence ~LD-LIF! analysis to determine the surface coverage of chlorine during steady-state etching. Laser interferometry was used to measure etch rates, and optical emission actinometry and Langmuir probe analysis were used to characterize the plasma. The ICP operated in ...

Al2O3 and Y2O3 are both very promising host materials for active integrated optics applications such as rare-earth ion doped waveguide lasers. In this paper, a reactive co-sputtering process for stable, target condition-independent deposition of Al2O3 layers with high optical quality is discussed. The loss of as-deposited Al2O3 waveguides in the near infrared wavelength range was 0.3 dB/cm. Rea...

The use of carbon nanotubes as tips in atomic force microscopy for a systematic study of dry etching pattern transfer in GaAs is described. The GaAs samples are patterned via electron beam lithography and then etched using magnetron reactive ion or chemically assisted ion beam processing. The technique allows diagnosis, in air, of etched features with scale sizes of ,100 nm. © 1998 American Ins...

It has been found that in the etching of SiO2 using CHF3 in an inductively coupled plasma reactor of the planarized coil design, a thin steady state fluorocarbon film can play an important role in determining the rate of etching. This etching is encountered as the amount of bias power used in the SiO2 etching process is increased, and a transition from fluorocarbon film growth on the SiO2 to an...